[IMAGE] A13(-WIFI) Debian (now Ubuntu) + xfce flashable (Updated: 08 Mar: R18)

[drspastic]

ps. how about trying to shrink the system into a true lightweight like the many sub 200meg distros? what is it that makes them not need the extra gigabytes? the board dont have much hardware to support.

[JohnS]

It's easy to make it smaller: just leave out all the things people asked for above.  Which would be silly!

To get a small Linux build your own 

[jwischka]

hmmm so if mali 400 aint fully implemented in the kernel then i guess allwinner are trying to push us all to android....no thanks allwinner.

as for ubuntu, i used it for many years but gave up when it started getting really fat and lazy like windows.
i imagine switching now will put you back a few paces, it it worth it? besides debian is a very standard base with lots of support and more likely to fit with industrial use.

a good one to play with if you want to expand is slack. just for pure stability.

both deb and buntu have a really fat bag of apps available , i hear rumours that ubuntu changed something with the latest releases that make package management incompatible with earlier staff and deb.
maybe that wont affect arm repos. im no expert.

for my penny, you invested so much time getting so far with deb v10 image it might be best to stay debian.

and hope allwinner cough up some more code for the mali400

The main reason to go to Ubuntu over Debian would be faster updates (which means, perhaps, better support for armhf, faster). Most of the "slowness" people complain about with Ubuntu is related to Unity, and is a non-factor on this board. At this point, I have a Ubuntu image running on a separate card, so it really wouldn't be a huge deal to go that direction.

The main reason to stay with Debian is support for older processors (ARM6, like in the Raspberry Pi). That's not really a huge factor for us.

Package availability is pretty similar, and I would see it being about the same going forward, as both distros have plans to support the armhf platform going forward. Which is good for us.

ps. how about trying to shrink the system into a true lightweight like the many sub 200meg distros? what is it that makes them not need the extra gigabytes? the board dont have much hardware to support.

It's easy to make it smaller: just leave out all the things people asked for above.  Which would be silly!

To get a small Linux build your own 

^^ what he said. Take out XFCE. Take out swap. Don't compile in support for USB networking, USB video cameras, audio devices, etc. Don't include GCC, python, or development tools, etc. Which is what you would do if you were trying to make a deployable image in an industrial environment - literally rip everything away. But if you're trying to make something generic that comes up and boots into a nice, pretty environment so that people can use it without having problems... you need some of that other stuff.

More to the point, though, I'm wondering if there is some junk on my memory card that is being read in the DD that doesn't really need to be there - stuff that could be perhaps "fixed" by a clean card, and drop the compressed size of the image. I may try to build an entirely new card today from scratch and see how that goes.

[drspastic]

i suppose the dev stuff does eat a lot but true we will need it to be able to progress in our individual end applications. i think i have got stuck into an unhealthy pattern of thinking after years of using tiny, include everything, run in ram distros. looking back i see that on my laptop my 'tiny 130M distro' after i added the dev stuff (160M) and then another 500M that seems to have fell in a memory hole somewhere, it aint that small any more.

now about the sound, do you think i will be able to get it running without any fiddling with kernels?
i will do some reading up on the interweb and see if theres anything, but please tell me if im wasting my time.

the linaro image did seem to work well but i kicked it aside as i couldnt get the net working. i will bitch no more about ubuntu. its been a while since i last used it, although i do use lupu 5.28 which is based on it and runs well in minimal systems.

most of the ham radio apps i need are available in ubuntu and debian, and i will look forward to '11' whatever flavour you make it.

[jwischka]

I'm looking into it now. Audio support is compiled into the kernel, but as a module so I think that should work. If you can't get it working then I will try to compile built-in and we can see how that goes. It also looks the CEDAR support was pulled out somewhere, which could explain why some of the video performance was bad. I'm recompiling a new kernel with that built-in as we speak.

I think I'm going to build an image from linaro-nano, which should be quite lean - the default boot takes about 3 seconds, though obviously it will take longer when we add in some other toys.

GPIO will be back in the next kernel... forgot to add that in after the delete.

i suppose the dev stuff does eat a lot but true we will need it to be able to progress in our individual end applications. i think i have got stuck into an unhealthy pattern of thinking after years of using tiny, include everything, run in ram distros. looking back i see that on my laptop my 'tiny 130M distro' after i added the dev stuff (160M) and then another 500M that seems to have fell in a memory hole somewhere, it aint that small any more.

now about the sound, do you think i will be able to get it running without any fiddling with kernels?
i will do some reading up on the interweb and see if theres anything, but please tell me if im wasting my time.

the linaro image did seem to work well but i kicked it aside as i couldnt get the net working. i will bitch no more about ubuntu. its been a while since i last used it, although i do use lupu 5.28 which is based on it and runs well in minimal systems.

most of the ham radio apps i need are available in ubuntu and debian, and i will look forward to '11' whatever flavour you make it.

[JohnS]

Rather than less I was going to ask for more.  Actually, sort of the opposite (read on...)

With chasing my AXP209 problem I've not kept up with recent releases but what I mean above is:
as well as more can we have less?  That is, the less command

John

[jwischka]

Rather than less I was going to ask for more.  Actually, sort of the opposite (read on...)

With chasing my AXP209 problem I've not kept up with recent releases but what I mean above is:
as well as more can we have less?  That is, the less command

John

Heh... yeah, I'll add it in.

[Ekkehard]

jwischka,

packages that I'd like to see?

• As I said earlier, with a networked nix box, time stamps are close to mandatory, so ntp would be nice
• I personally like sshfs to mount my *real* disk during development so I don't wear out the SD card
• Yeah - less would be more
• Maybe g++?
• How much room is left to fill 4G?

I will also use apache2 and a bunch of simple web pages as the ultimately only way to communicate with the OlinuXino in my application.  But I won't favor including it in the standard package.  After all, once networked, apt-get install is rather easy to use.

You said you had performance issues with apache?  It served my (admittedly simple) web pages with rather good performance - no complaints here...

[jwischka]

NTP will be on, and less as well. Installing sshfs right now. g++ has been on all the images.

There should be plenty of room, so we can add whatever, really. I agree, though, that apache is probably something best left for others to install.

It's a speed issue - for some reason on my main webserver apache seems to be capping download speeds at ~300KB/s. Which is annoying. Haven't had a ton of time to debug it, but this is the first time I've ever really seen the issue with apache.

jwischka,

packages that I'd like to see?

• As I said earlier, with a networked nix box, time stamps are close to mandatory, so ntp would be nice
• I personally like sshfs to mount my *real* disk during development so I don't wear out the SD card
• Yeah - less would be more
• Maybe g++?
• How much room is left to fill 4G?

I will also use apache2 and a bunch of simple web pages as the ultimately only way to communicate with the OlinuXino in my application.  But I won't favor including it in the standard package.  After all, once networked, apt-get install is rather easy to use.

You said you had performance issues with apache?  It served my (admittedly simple) web pages with rather good performance - no complaints here...

[skenter]

Dear jwischka thank you for this amazing work.  I have a question regarding booting. I am using headless version (R10) and I realize that the only way to boot normal the board is to have connected the serial cable.  Is this a normal behavior? This is a problem because i want to use the board on embedded system and there is no way to connect the serial port every time. Do you know who I can change this behavior
Thank you

[jwischka]

You should be able to connect via SSH or VNC, once the board is booted and has a network connection - but the board should boot without a serial connection.

Dear jwischka thank you for this amazing work.  I have a question regarding booting. I am using headless version (R10) and I realize that the only way to boot normal the board is to have connected the serial cable.  Is this a normal behavior? This is a problem because i want to use the board on embedded system and there is no way to connect the serial port every time. Do you know who I can change this behavior
Thank you

[skenter]

Yes i know, but i can't undrestand why is not bootin with out the serial. With out it is geting on SUNXI

You should be able to connect via SSH or VNC, once the board is booted and has a network connection - but the board should boot without a serial connection.

Dear jwischka thank you for this amazing work.  I have a question regarding booting. I am using headless version (R10) and I realize that the only way to boot normal the board is to have connected the serial cable.  Is this a normal behavior? This is a problem because i want to use the board on embedded system and there is no way to connect the serial port every time. Do you know who I can change this behavior
Thank you

[jwischka]

How do you know it's getting stuck on sunxi? I'm not entirely sure what you mean. Do you mean that it's not getting past uboot?

Yes i know, but i can't undrestand why is not bootin with out the serial. With out it is geting on SUNXI

[Ekkehard]

jwischka,

you said g++ is always installed.  You sure?
I just did

Code Select Expand

$ g++ --version
-bash: g++: command not found
$
on a brand-new headless R10 image. gcc is there, just g++ isn't.  Not sure how important it is for this community - it is 19.1 MB additional space...  My code won't compile without it, but of course I don't mind at all installing it myself.  Just wanted to be sure we're on the same page with respect to it being pre-installed.

[jwischka]

Hrm. I was certain it was on there. Anyway, it is (was) on R11, which I checked when you asked. Of course, now I'm rebuilding R11 from scratch, because I'm having problems getting VNC to load properly. Sigh...

I also have it on my own personal build (which is on a separate card) so I might have been thinking of that. Hard to keep all these cards straight.

jwischka,

you said g++ is always installed.  You sure?
I just did

Code Select Expand

$ g++ --version
-bash: g++: command not found
$
on a brand-new headless R10 image. gcc is there, just g++ isn't.  Not sure how important it is for this community - it is 19.1 MB additional space...  My code won't compile without it, but of course I don't mind at all installing it myself.  Just wanted to be sure we're on the same page with respect to it being pre-installed.